''Someone put strychnine in my dope. It was in Switzerland. I was totally comatose but I was totally awake. I could listen to everyone, and they were like, 'He's dead, he's dead!', waving their fingers and pushing me about, and I was thinking, 'I'm not dead!'''

Keith Richards isn't dead yet, and that makes him a national hero for the weird and degenerate. The anecdote quoted above was probably his worst trip, revealed in the NME during the recent and ongoing celebration of the fact that he isn't six feet under already.

Strychnine didn't kill Keith. But it did kill Emily Inglethorpe, found dead in her bed in Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (psst ... it was the husband). She wasn't much older than Keith but evidently had a weaker constitution. As did Phar Lap, the legendary Australian race horse of the 1930s (surprising that, when you see the size of his embalmed heart). When the diaries of Phar Lap's trainer Harry Telford came up at auction earlier this year, it was revealed the horse had been fed arsenic, belladonna, caffeine, cocaine and strychnine. It was a lot of the first and a little of the last that did for him.

Strychnine has been used to kill rats, dogs, Psycho's mother and Delta Blues musician Robert Johnson. Severe spasms start shortly after ingestion. These develop into violent convulsions, before the spine arches and the body finally asphyxiates. Then rigor mortis sets in. It's obviously a popular death with B movie directors and ham actors, giving considerable scope for serious melodrama.

Richards is clearly a fiend with a different kind of thoroughbred constitution. But what does that make Thomas J Hicks? On strychnine, Richards was spiked on the floor, silently eavesdropping on his own death. Hicks, on the other hand, was running the 1904 Olympic marathon in St Louis.

It was, by contemporary accounts, a hellish race: run in terrible heat on a mud track churned into dust by an accompanying fleet of motor cars. Hicks finished second, which was a fine effort considering he had ingested more than a milligram of strychnine sulphate and a large glass of brandy on his way around the course. Clearly on some kind of hell-bent or heaven-sent hot streak, Hicks was then awarded the gold medal after it turned out that the winner, New York's Fred Lorz, actually travelled in a car for 11 miles of the race.

That should be another strange story for some other article, but I just can't help myself. Lorz's excuse was ludicrous - and credit is due for sustaining his version of events under the judge's bemused interrogation.

Lorz: "So, after nine miles of running, I'm dead beat. I just can't go on. My trainer, well he's just shouting out the window of the support car, 'Fred, you're killing yourself out here. We need to get you some help, quick'. So I think, 'time to quit', and get in the car and we drive back towards the stadium."

Judge: "But you didn't tell any of the officials, or your fellow runners you were quitting, Mr Lorz?"

Lorz: "No, there was no one around to tell. So we're driving back, and would you believe it, the car breaks down. Well I felt a little better for the rest so I figured I'd just jog the rest of the way. Then, when I got to the stadium I saw I was early. There were all these people there cheering, the clock was still ticking and that red tape was just waiting to be broken ..."

Judge: "So you pretended to be the winner?"

Lorz: "It was just a joke. It seemed like a funny idea at the time. I was going to tell you before you gave me the medal. Honest."

They swallowed the story, but took his medal and banned him for a year. The dope and booze-addled Hicks was made the winner. He had collapsed after crossing the line, was carried off by the doctors and never competed again.

While Lorz had used a car as a quick fix, Hicks had used, well, a quick fix. His trainer afterwards admitted they had decided "to inject him with a milligram of sulphate of strychnine and to make him drink a large glass brimming with brandy". Hicks then "set off again as best he could". But one hit was not enough. ''He needed another injection four miles from the end to give him a semblance of speed and to get him to the finish.''

Hicks kept his medal, a decision possibly influenced by the embarrassment Lorz had already caused. The leniency also reflected the fact that doping, and strychnine abuse in particular, was commonplace at the time. Now the drug seems so archaic that Hicks's story has a certain twisted humour. But the ramifications of its use were just as obnoxious as those of HGH and steroids are today.

The Olympics has a long, inglorious history of drug abuse. But the prevalence of drugs scandals today are costing the Olympics more of its credibility than at any point in the past.

The cumulative destruction of public faith and interest was kick-started by Ben Johnson and Flo-Jo in the 1980s, and it's run on through Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery, Marion Jones and innumerable other once-great champions in between. Simply put, there seems to be less public appetite and excitement for these Games than you'd expect. The location is attracting a lot of attention, but the sporting contests themselves aren't.

There are a lot of reasons why, but the main one is doping. I'm not sure that drug abuse is more or less common now than it ever was in the Olympics; just as I'm not sure whether there is more or less substance abuse in the modern Tour de France than at any other point in its history. Yet, over time, the Games have become more tainted by substances than Phar Lap's breakfast. There have been cocaine Games, benzedrine Games, strychnine Games, steroid Games, THG and HGH Games.

However, it is certainly the case that more is being done to catch and expose dope cheats than ever before. It's the natural consequence of the intensified public disgust and press outrage. More athletes were banned for doping in the 2004 Games than at any of its predecessors. I expect the number to be just as large this year.

If there wasn't such palpable evidence of the authorities' anti-doping work, then the public wouldn't believe they were doing their jobs - such is the extent of our scepticism towards the athletes. The trouble is, the more dopers they do expose, the more our paranoia spreads and general cynicism grows. The cure is simply feeding our fear of the disease: a genuine Catch-22.